what's the worst that could happen quote

It’s not just about expecting bad things to happen (pessimism), but reflecting on why you expect bad things to happen and what you can do to avert perceived (that word is important) disaster.

However, while being pessimistic is a pretty thankless pastime, I’d like to introduce you to a strategy called defensive pessimism.ĭefensive pessimism has been proven to help people who are anxious not only increase their confidence but be more successful than common or garden pessimists.Įver used the phrase, “What’s the worst thing that can happen?”. Mark Twain summed it up when he said, “I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” That means that 97% of our worries are just the product of unfounded pessimism, in other words, expecting bad things to happen without evidence and for no good reason. What’s more, of the 15% of worries that did happen, 79% of the research subjects discovered they could handle the challenge better than they anticipated, or learned a valuable lesson from the experience. Yet one piece of research found that 85% of what we worry about never happens. Our inbuilt negativity bias means around 80% of our thoughts are negative. I wrote a list of all the things that I’d worried about that had happened and all the things that hadn’t happened.

A few weeks back, after a pretty full-on time publishing my book, launching a new programme and doing a website refresh, I undertook a Worry Review.

What's the worst that could happen quote